The World Wide Web Consortium is a repository of specifications for all technologies on the Web. As a web developer, you might have gone to their site looking for an answer to a question about XHTML, or to learn more about a new technology, such as “XSL Formatting Objects” or “Scalable Vector Graphics”.
So, you turn to the specification and almost immediately find yourself confused. It’s impossible to read, you think. But, in fact, it’s readable if you consider one key point. But it becomes clearer if you consider one important thing – Specification is not a user manual!
For answers to your questions, you usually look for a manual or a user’s guide: you want to use the technology. That is not the purpose of the W3C specification. Its purpose is to tell those who are going to implement the technology what features it should have and how they should work.
It’s like the difference between your car’s owner’s manual and its repair manual. An owner’s manual tells you how to replace your windshield wiper blades. But the repair manual will tell you the dimensions of the brushes and show you the parts to attach them: you’ll have to use that information to figure out how to replace them.
If the technology is new, you won’t always find reference information for it: the only documentation available is the datasheet. In this case, learning to read the specification is not a luxury, but a necessity.